Planning is an art and a science. It’s necessary but doesn’t have to be a necessary evil.
A few years ago, I was working on a project for a company in a heavily regulated industry. The project had several workstreams. One involved reimagining how the company’s widget was packaged and what the accompanying instructions looked like to reduce user confusion and potentially harmful mistakes. Another involved reimagining the entire customer service process, from call centers to triage to resolution to reporting. Others focused on updating processes and preparing teams for regular inspections, a natural aspect of the client’s industry.
The project was big enough to have a multi-year, multi-million dollar budget and was sponsored by a cross-functional group of VPs, with corresponding participation from each function.
The client brought another consultant to create and manage the project plan. The plan was composed of project leads from each of the workstreams. It was detailed. It could aggregate those details by workstream. It had milestones and dependencies for each workstream and across the whole project. It was regularly updated via weekly check-ins.
It was built in a tool that only two people had access to.
There were no at-a-glance dashboards.
It was not integrated with other systems that could feed info for resources’ time or line-item costs or automatically extract info for up-to-date, on-demand dashboards.
If a project sponsor or senior leader had a question, it would take a surprising amount of time to get an answer. Things you’d expect to easily understand were somewhat hard to tease out.
Are we on track? I heard we’re behind – what’s the root cause? What’s the overall impact of a 2-month delay in rolling out a new IT system or a new training program at one of the call centers? What happens if I need to shift a few subject matter experts to an urgent project for 3 months?
It was shocking how much money and effort went into building and managing the project plan, but it was almost useless. It was good at providing certain agreed information on a weekly cadence but failed at providing quick answers to strategic questions.
It was an own goal that cost the company money and frustrated project team members and sponsors alike. All of this waste and frustration could’ve been avoided.
Before you begin any project, take a moment to think about why you’re doing it, and let that guide you on how to measure progress and define success. Layer in the big risks or constraints that you already know about. Build out a framework that will get you from start to finish, but don’t build in too much detail two years out because it will almost always change.
Your company may prefer one methodology over another or use one project management system over another. That’s fine. In terms of getting value out of your plan, those factors won’t matter nearly as much as the thoughtfulness and intention you put into it upfront.
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